A San Francisco-based blog for residents of the neighborhood probably best known as The Tendernob.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Polk Salad Annie

The old Royal Ground coffee on Polk near Sacramento, out west of the Academy District, is now Moka Coffee. It's like a microcosm of what's happening to the rest of San Francisco. A sorta quirky, sometimes skeevy but inexpensive and unpretentious hangout for the locals has been turned into a somewhat sterile, uncomfortable retail outlet for pretentious prats who ride the Google bus to work.

God, did I just say that? I usually welcome a degree of gentrification - hey, it keeps people employed and beats the alternative - but I'm worried the nature and magnitude of the gentrification we're seeing isn't helping the locals, it's destroying them.

I'm also worried it's based on an unsustainable real estate and internet/cloud/mobile bubble that's going to burst, leaving a lot of shuttered storefronts, overpriced unoccupied condos and locals even worse off than they were before...